Nasa Official’S Dreams Being Fulfilled
If Ray Bradbury hadn’t come up with the title first, Donna Shirley’s life story might be titled “The Martian Chronicles.” The red planet has fascinated her since she was 11.
Last year, Shirley was inducted into Women in Technology Institute’s Hall of Fame.
Also last year, a dream came true for Shirley, who is head of NASA’s Mars Explorer Program, when the Pathfinder mission made it to Mars. Pathfinder and its robotic rover, Sojourner, returned with valuable data about the planet’s surface, atmosphere and weather. The program will fly two missions to Mars every 26 months through 2005.
Sherri Eng, a staff writer with the San Jose Mercury News, discussed Shirley’s career and her thoughts on women’s roles in technology.
Q. You were one of six female engineering students at your college. What challenges did you and the other women engineers face?
A. The only incident was when I applied for the program. I walked into my adviser’s office during my freshman year and he said, “What are you doing here?” I said, “I’m here to enroll in aeronautical engineering.” He said, “Well, girls can’t be engineers.” I said, “Yes, they can.” And I did.
(In class) we didn’t face any particular discrimination. We got teased, but we didn’t have any overt discrimination that I could remember. In fact, I was admitted to the aeronautical engineering club. We took all the same classes, we welded and did all the same things boys did.
Q. How is technology currently affecting women’s advancement in the workplace?
A. I think it’s having a big impact because it is so ubiquitous. … Technology has moved along and become such a part of daily life that women, as well as men, are more exposed to it. There are more opportunities for women to notice technology and get comfortable with it.
Q. What can we do to encourage women to go into technology?
A. Our education system is not working. There’s still an awful lot of channeling girls into girl-type areas. I remember my daughter coming home from nursery school 15 years ago; I had said something about girls becoming doctors and she said, “Oh no, girls can’t be doctors, they’re nurses.” And this is with both of her parents being engineers! So, it’s out there. It comes up through the water pipes or something. The environment is such that it discourages girls from taking on the bigger roles. On the other hand, if a girl wants to, the culture is nowhere near as hostile, in general, as it used to.
You need to get young people interested in technology. I think there should be technology literacy classes in a curriculum just as there are health classes and English and history and so on.
Q. What advice would you offer young women entering technical fields?
A. You need to be really good at what you do. There’s no substitute for skill. If you are like me and not naturally brilliant at this, that means you’re going to have to work really hard. Engineering and science are very difficult subjects.
When you get into the workplace, the important thing is to learn to work in teams. Women are actually very good at this. They are more comfortable working with groups of people than some men are. Everything we do today is in teams.
You can’t play on being a woman. You can’t say, “OK, I’m a woman, promote me.” You see some people who think, “If I’m not getting promoted fast, it’s because I’m a woman.” They really ought to look first at whether they are doing a good job or not, and sometimes, they’re not.
A lot of people think they want to get promoted and go into management just because that seems like the right thing to do. And it turns out that that’s not necessarily the right thing to do for a lot of people. You can still have a lot of fulfillment continuing to do technical work. You don’t necessarily have to climb the corporate ladder.